Counting Your Citations 2

A More Thorough Method Using Cited Reference Search

With this method you start with your complete publications bibliography, and look up each individual paper in turn as a cited reference. This is tedious, but the advantage is that you will probably get higher total citation numbers than you would using the quick method above. The limitations: Citation data are scanned and entered into WOS as printed; any errors in the original citation will be replicated in the database. The Cited Work abbreviation is standardized when possible, and the citation is parsed for tabular entry and indexing of these fields: Cited Author, Cited Work, Year, Volume, and Page. This method does not calculate an h-index; you would have to enter the citation totals into your own spreadsheet to determine it.

Click on the Cited Reference Search tab.

Prefer searching on the paper's FIRST AUTHOR whenever possible, even if you're not the first author.

Cited author names are indexed by surname, followed by up to two initials; full given names are not used. Using a * wildcard symbol after the first initial is highly recommended. Example: PAULING, L* You can use a middle initial if you want to, or when it's necessary to narrow down a search on a common surname (ex.: SMITH, DK).

Watch out for other authors with identical names and initials. If your name is a fairly common one, your papers will be mixed in with those of other authors with the same name, and you'll have to filter these out manually.

Lengthy surnames, Asian names, and compound names can be problematic. The ISI databases enter cited authors exactly as they appear in the citing papers, so misspellings, typos, and inversions are very common. It's advisable to try searching several different variants to make sure you find as many as possible. For example, if your name is Richard Smith-Jones, try SMITHJONES, R*; SMITH-JONES, R*; JONES, RS; etc. Try to anticipate how citing authors might misstate or misinterpret this kind of name. WoS limits the author surname to 15 characters.

Leave the Cited Work search box blank, because you will miss entries that have errors or variants in this field. Enter the year in the Cited Year field. Click Search.

When you pull up the index list of cited articles, note carefully the variant and erroneous entries of individual papers, and select all likely matches. Some entries will lack volume or page numbers, and some will have variant cited work abbreviations or incorrect or inverted vol/page numbers or years. You must use your judgment to determine which are likely matches and which are not.)

If the paper does not appear in the Cited Reference index at all, this means it has not been cited in an ISI source publication.

ISI tracks citations from various sources. The bulk come from the 6650 Source Journals covered in Science Citation Index-Expanded. (You can browse and search a list of Source Journals by following the link next to the Cited Work search box.) In 2009 ISI added citation data from its Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes, which increased overall citation numbers.

If a citation to one of your papers is in a publication not covered by ISI, that citation will not be represented. Examples of citations not covered are those in: books, dissertations, patents, web pages, etc. On the other hand, it does not matter where the cited document appeared -- only where the citing paper was.

Add up the Citing Articles numbers in the Index list for each entry that matches the paper in question. This the total citation figure.

Why stop here? If you do choose to finish the search, don't use the SELECT ALL option -- this will eliminate "duplicates" and will also result in a lower count.

If you want to remove self-citations (papers where you cited your own previous work), you can do this using the Advanced Search mode. First, select all desired entries from the Index list and click the Finish Search button. Then, click on Search and search your name as Author (not Cited Author). Finally, go to Advanced Search and combine these results with your previous hit set using the NOT operator: "#1 NOT #2".

You can set up a Citation Alert in Web of Science. This allows you to register and receive an email alert when a new citation to a particular paper is added to the database.